Authorship Criteria

Last change 1/1/2025

Authorship Criteria

Authorship confers credit and has important academic, social, financial implications as well as accountability for published work. It is the moral obligation of an editorial board to ensure that individuals making significant contribution to a paper are given credit for it but also to ensure that the authors understand their role in taking responsibility for their publication.

Pakistan Armed Forces Medical Journal follows the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) guidelines which recommends that authorship be based on the following four criteria:

  • Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
  • Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
  • Final approval of the version to be published; AND
  • Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

All those designated as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors. Those who do not meet all four criteria but have made substantive contribution in the research should be acknowledged in the acknowledgment section of the article.

We accept publications/articles from both National and International Authors.

It is important to note that:

  • Funding agencies, data collectors and biostatisticians, do not justify authorship.
  • Once authorship certificate is submitted, no further change will be allowed in the sequence and/or addition of new authors.

Authors’ Contributions

An author contributorship statement defining each author’s contribution to the article should be provided. This must be done in two forms: one by filling out the authors’ certificate (can be downloaded from the PAFMJ website link

For review articles, where individual statements are less applicable, a statement should be included that clarifies who was responsible for the ideation, who performed the literature search and/or data analysis, and who drafted and revised the work.

Deceased Authors

Deceased authors would be included with a death dagger (†) next to the author's name and a footnote stating that the author is deceased along with the date of death.